Baerstun

Save your best rolls for the backstory!

After dealing with the cows and demons, the party set out from the now-invisible Head of Avandra for Seven Mills. Around lunchtime they broke bread with a farmer who was selling apples and strawberry wine. He taught Rache this song from the Seven Mills Harvest Festival:

…which was based on the story of Sehanine's masked ball, and Pelor falling for her trickery. The festival is seven days of harvest work and seven nights of revelry, although from what you've seen from the first day of the festival, it doesn't appear that much harvest work is getting done. Lots of farmers have brought their harvests to the town to have their grains milled, and to take home a mixed share of flour and beer that they can keep for the winter. Everyone is wearing masks, and now the party is going masked as well. Lenora is "disguised" as a goat-legged devil, for example, and I know Bree is working on a Gelatinous Cube costume; feel free to let me know what costume you're working on.

You've found lodgings at the Horse and Hound ("There's one in every city," Lenora assures you all) and Rache was offered a paying position playing the lyre. Late on the night before the festival opened, civilians were sweeping the streets and getting their stalls ready for the next day, and most of you set out to look for the three clerics you've been following since you left Baerston. You all learned that Bronn is rebuilding Moradin's Old Temple (outside the walls) but that he is a fairly well-known citizen at the New Temple as well. You didn't manage to ask after Krunis yet. And for Marina, you sent the following message to her, with the first cat dumb enough to get caught:

Terciel received a letter from Lt. Magnusson (attached) and also the attentions of a very attractive barmaid, who was absolutely fascinated to hear where he'd been and what the Feywild was like and pretty much anything else he wanted to tell her, she was also mildly interested to hear that Terciel had a friend who was a naval officer when a Watch member delivered a reply from LT Magnusson to the letter Terciel had sent with the Eladrin ships bound for Baerstun.

The next morning, you all set out to look for Bronn, and as you passed the pavilion where Melora's shrine was set up, a gang of children enacted a very familiar story with lots of swashbuckling, and children in sheep costumes who spun around and menaced each other with wolf costumes! Right about the time that four of the six of you were managing to pick your jaws up off the floor at the sight of four other children fighting off this menace, one of them shouted, "Oh silken bow, now watch me CUT you, Moe!” and fired off a fusillade of twigs from a makeshift bow she was carrying.

“I’m Terciella, the eladrin princess archer assassin. My bow shoots tornadoes and razors made of white silk and when the witches turn the sheep into wolves I can turn them back by shooting her heart out and then I use her heart to cast a spell to make my hair so shiny that my enemies can’t look away and then I can step through the tunnel ports and I tunnel port to wherever I want and tunnel port some delicious berries from the feywires and I can sell them for a thousand hundred pieces of silver and use that to buy more fey wires for my bow and silk ribbons and then I let all of the animals out of their cages except for the otyughs and then I stab the otyughs through the face with a pontoon.”

Having gotten exactly the reaction she hoped for, she gathered up her brood, weaseled a gold coin from you, and told you all where to find Marina — the Blind Orc tavern, by the west gates.

You arrive back at the Horse & Hound to discover Bree is already drunk as a collegiate wizard can be at this hour of the day without resorting to heavy recreational magicks. She spent the morning socializing with the none-too-busy barmaid, and when you arrive, she gleefully mumbles something about sigils and warnings, and says that you guys have GOT to go see the Wizard's Mill when you're done. Luckily, heading down to the Blind Orc will take you right past it.

Believe it not, this is the short version.

So after dispatching the ogre before he could ring for help, the party encountered a groundskeeper who look one look at Lenora's Shield (looted from an orc way back when) and assumed the party were emmisarries from Bonewhite's invading army. The party decided to go along with this to find out what is going on, and was put up in sumptious quarters, but were aware they were also being watched. After jamming the scrying spell observing them with a ritual, they made a quick search of the house and discovered a well stocked multilingual library including such classics as "Mein Kamphy Chair" in Giant, and "A fleeting overview of the seventy-third round of The Great Game, as played by Tegrammanon The Golden aided by sundry peoples — Including Tegrammanon’s Discourse on the merits of the Tribal Stacking with Flowers (Rolling Variant with Passes) versus Neo-classical Feuds and Legal Deterrence (Modified Figwit’s Gray Gambit, Inverted)" in Draconic. They also discovered a hidden room belonging to Narmo Mornamarya and had set a trap for him, which was interrupted when a group of Eladrin broke in halfway through the night to kidnap Rache.

Further summary from our DM:

The PCs killed everyone who came to kidnap Rache except for the person that Terciel (and Darg, and Rache) recognized, and an archer named Boaz who is currently bagged and tagged, but still alive. Yes, you took another hostage. But it's cool! Lenora survived a harrowing wrestling match with Boaz right on the edge of the exterior balcony, Darg acquitted himself marvelously well as a healer and leaped from the landing to the ground floor to prevent Alaric from escaping and raising the alarm. Thea rocked the ever-loving hell out of an athletics check to jump from the upstairs balcony, clear the stairs and the landing, and come down right in front of Cadfael. Then she chopped him in half. At various points during and after the battle, the following important things were revealed:

"Annmar", who Rache heard had stolen the feymoss from the eladrin tomb in Baerstun, was actually Tirnariel, Terciel's sister, who also knows Darg. Tirnariel was traveling under a false name.

Rache knows (from the ritual that Osmund cast) that Annmar (Tirnariel!) is related to her; specifically, Tirnariel is Rache's half-sister. Terciel revealed that he always knew Tirnariel was an illegitimate (non-Sulkano) half-sister to Terciel but was mortified to realize that it was a Mornamarya. This means that Tirnariel's mother is also Terciel's mother, and Tirnariel's father — Narmo, who owns the manor house — is also Rache's father. Thea's player figured this out by sketching a family tree. ("By hood rules, you are all related.")

Rache said that her mother was raped by Narmo, and admitted that it was actually she, Rache, who killed Liante.

Tirnariel had followed Liante through a portal in his (Feywild) home in order to find Terciel and clear his name, but the portal opened up onto the smoldering ruins of a village called Trammel. Back at Trammel, Terciel's prayer to Avandra — "I hope Avandra protects everyone who got away from this awful place" — was a particularly fun moment for me, because Rache was standing right there with ogre blood dripping down her chin.

But so time appears to pass very differently between the feywild and the mortal plane, because Liante was still alive at Terciel's trial, which was before his banishment… but here on the mortal plane, Liante was killed before or very soon after Terciel showed up. Further complicating things, Tirnariel claims to have been on this plane for several months!

A while ago, then, Tirnariel took the job to steal the feymoss which had been stolen from the Sulkano tomb. Later, she took the job to kidnap Rache because Narmo told Tirnariel that Rache had betrayed and murdered Liante, and had stolen feymoss from the Sulkano family tomb. Rache has admitted that, while it probably sounds bad when you put it that way, it's all technically true. The last thing Narmo had told Tirnariel was that Rache had something that he needed to cast the ritual that will help him clear Terciel's name.

…but when Tirnariel told this to the party, Bree remembered the ritual in the book she was reading called 'Greater Fey Gate' which uses, among other things, violet feymoss and the lifeblood of an eladrin. Narmo's plan was apparently to open a giant gate to the Feywild by killing Rache – who is, after all, at least half-eladrin. Terciel suspects, based on the description that the portal is going to be VERY large, that Narmo intends to use it to bring stolen Sulkano ships (the crime for which Terciel was framed and banished!) to sell to Admiral Godwin. So Narmo may be planning to sell the ships to Admiral Godwin BUT the groundskeeper seemed very hospitable when she thought you were emissaries of Thurig Silverhand. So that's weird.

And so anyway, the plan going forward is to use the potion of mimicry to disguise Boaz as Rache, gag him, and deliver him to Narmo, with Tirnariel pretending to be still-on-his-side, and with the rest of you disguised, however poorly, as the other men who came to grab Rache. Then you will kill Narmo, and burn him to pieces, then stomp on the pieces, then put the pieces in a jar and smash jar, etc. etc. Darg objected to burning down such a finely-made mansion — it would be a grave affront to Moradin.

Oh, and lastly: when Tirnariel was explaining why she believed Narmo, a known liar, and risked her neck to go do favors for an amoral sociopath, to get something that she could have possibly obtained by less dangerous means, she replied "I didn't say it was a GOOD plan," which received a quorum of votes to be the party's new unofficial motto.

Cerulean continues:

So, the party did in fact kill the heck out of Narmo, (with particular enthusiasm from Rache and Terciel) but not before he completed enough of the Greater Fey Gate ritual that killing him actually completed it. The portal opened and the ships were brought through before it collapsed, causing the reality "bubble" around Sandstone to dissipate with a great deal of atmospheric disturbance. After dispatching Narmo, the party questioned his workers and learned the entire population of the village had been ensalved by Narmo and his Ogre enforcers, and they set out to free the Villagers and inspire them to rise up and help the party overthrow the orges.

After a pitched battle with impressively low redshirt casualties, the party examined the ships Narmo brought from the feywild, and found them all equipped with a tracking devices. The party theorized that Narmo intended the ships to be sold to Admiral Godwin, while also collecting from Bonewhite for the trackers. They removed the devices without disarming them and put them into a ratty old boat. Then they sent the whole floatilla, along with a letter of introduction from Terciel and Rache, North to Baerstun where the villagers could recoup the profit from selling the ships as funds to rebuild their town, while the Admiral could gain a intel advantage using the decoy ship.

The party continued on to Seven Mills, and were again waylaid, this time by a big giant floating head that turned out to be piloted by one of Bree's old professors from The University. After the party fended off several waves of attackers, Professor Boleos managed to ward the head sufficiently to allow them to continue into Seven Mills and decide what to do with the three story flying head of Avandra later.

(We're skipping a summary here: in sum, after the adventurers defeated the dinosaur-riding-warlock, a load more came out of the trees, so they and the dwarves piled onto the one remaining ship and cast off for the Redstone Penninsula. On the way, they were attacked by a Kraken. The party vanquished the ancient beast, but not before it scuttled their ship. The PCs managed to summon a Great Turtle to carry them to land.)

The turtle lurched through the choppy water of the bay, while Shard and the dwarves puttered off on a thin scribble of oily arcane smoke that hung in the air behind them, lit from within by intermittent blue and red flashes. The rest of the party watched until the engine was out of sight, and then set about securing Mr. Buckle's boxes to the turtle's shell. Terciel offered to keep watch; before everyone went to sleep they got their bearings on the weird hemispherical storm that had been the topic of so much discussion in Baerstun.

Early the next morning, when Terciel called out that they were about to make landfall, there was no sign of the storm. A pleasant beach scene unfolded before them. The turtle craned his neck around, rolling his massive eyes in the sockets and favoring the adventurers with an inscrutable look. Since he had clambered up onto the sand and lay there still, though, his meaning was clear. The party disembarked on the north shore of the Bay and Bree immediately set to work picking the locks on Mr. Buckle's chest. The first gave way easily, and the party had an extraordinarily brief debate about the ethics of transporting his valuable magical stock where it might give them some benefit. Darg hefted his new hammer and took a few practice swings while Thea strapped on a new pair of steel gauntlets.

Bree continued distractedly fiddling with the other box but was interrupted by a strange FZAMP sound. Bree herself heard something akin to the tolling of a giant bronze bell, and everything she could see took on a blue tint. "Moradin's Marbles, Bree, what are you on about?" "I'm, uh, fine! Fine! This thing is… there's a… it's got a magical trap. Be careful!"

The sound of singing wafted over the sand from a stand of nearby trees. They crossed the beach and rounded the point to find a handful of villagers dancing around a maypole. Bree leaped into the fray while the rest of them sang and danced. The headache from the blue FZAMP trap rung weirdly but the music was nice and she didn't really feel like stopping. Terciel waved and asked them how they were doing and they replied that they were fine, fine, everything here was fine. The adventurers suspected it was not quite so simple and began asking more questions; when Lenora pressed them and mentioned that something seemed suspicious, one dancer replied too eagerly that no, it was fine, and would she PLEASE stop saying bad things about the village? Rache shook her head once or twice, and then muttered, "oh dear God…" at which point a different dancer wailed, "Oh no…! Now you've done it!"

The villagers disappeared like a swirling cloud of leaves, and Bree felt a weird tugging on the soles of her feet for just a moment, and then they were gone. The adventurers looked around warily, and within moments four creatures burst through the shrubs at the periphery of the clearing: large purple-furred felines, with six legs and a pair of tentacles writhing in the air above their backs. They were somehow indistinct to everyone, but most especially to Bree who perceived them as barely even as substantial as a ghost. She had trouble focusing her eyes, and the headache spiked back to the front of her head when she tried to look directly at them.

They leaped at the adventurers, slapping and grabbing at them with the small razorhooks at the ends of their long tentacles. Thea and Lenora held their ground waiting to strike, but they were almost immediately soaked in their own blood from dozens of deep gashes, and the beasts were dancing just out of reach of their weapons. Terciel shot a pair of arrows at one, and the first went wide with a weird humming noise; the second THUNKed deep into the beast's flesh and its blurred form appeared far more solid. As soon as it materialized, Darg, Thea, and Lenora fell on it with their steel. Bree fired a burst of magic that sizzled, crackled, and then sputtered out … she tried an ice storm, a sticky web… nothing seemed to work, and everything she tried to cast made the soles of her feet burn, and the headache got worse and worse.

Darg dashed left and right, dodging the whipping tentacles and attending to his front-liners who were taking a beating. Terciel looked around for a clean place to shoot from so he wouldn't have to keep bobbing and weaving between them — they were penning in all of his friends and he'd have to make a break for it sooner rather than later if he was to survive. He appeared atop the maypole and began to rain arrows down into the creatures, focusing on the one he'd already tagged several times. It roared at him and pounced, scrambling up the maypole with its six clawed climbing feet. Terciel waited until it was completely off the ground and loosed a pair of arrows straight down at it. One of them had the cockatrice fletching from Aladar's shop, and as it sunk deep into the flesh there was a faint hissing noise. The displacer beast let go of the pole and tumbled to the ground, bounced once, and lay still. It snapped into focus and within moments it had turned entirely to stone. Terciel's face screwed into a weird scowl and he pulled out more normal arrows.

Thea chopped one beast almost entirely in half with her axe, and Lenora, Rache, and Darg worked hammer and tongs on the next one. Once they realized that bringing the beasts into focus made them vulnerable to all the usual kinds of damage — especially "hitting it with something sharp until it dies" — the fight went much better for them. One beast got away, and while Terciel tracked it through the bushes the rest of them gathered around the bodies and the maypole to learn what they could about the situation they'd stumbled into.

A teleportation spell had definitely carried the villagers away, and the blood in the sand was from their feet. The spell had taken the villagers away and used them as some sort of arcane counterweight to throw the displacer beasts to wherever the problem was. Terciel burst back through the underbrush with news: there was an ogre up ahead, at something that looked like a guard post.

"That's great news!" said Rache. "Let's go kill it."

"But it's standing by a bell," said Terciel, "it might ring for more ogres."

"Yes, excellent, we'll kill those as well then," said Rache, taking out her knife and tromping off in the direction Terciel had come from…

Session Summary

On the way out of Trammel, they had a good look around at the strange little village while Rache carved the hearts out of the four ogres' corpses. The horrific half of the town (the slave pens, the ogre dormitory, and the sprawling manor house) seemed grafted on to what had otherwise been a quaint but slightly backward village in the middle of nowhere. There was no sign of why Trammel's citizens had been enslaved, but it was clear that House Duchronaigh was responsible, and the ogres had been in on the arrangement. When they found the fifth ogre hanging by its ankle from a length of heavy chain, their worst suspicions were confirmed. Rache looked the body over briefly, cut it down, and proceeded to gouge out its heart as well, humming a quiet little tune under her breath and taking particular care in her task.

The rest of them followed Terciel as he and Shard inspected the trails in the area. Together they were able to deduce that a few villagers had escaped: one had fled the manor house, leaving a trail into the thick woods; another two or three had left by the road. The opposite road leading out of Trammel had only ogre footprints, but they were obscured by the signs of a scuffle ("There was a mighty duel; it ranged all over") which was doubtless part of the slave uprising. The thickly pooled dry blood on the floor of the manor house's bedroom strongly suggested that Lord Duchronaigh was the dead eladrin that SirHusit described; since Terciel recognized the Mornamarya family seal on the Duchronaigh stonework, it seems likely that Duchronaigh was a Mornamarya, and that there is now one less Mornamarya in the world. Husit's makeshift graveyard was undisturbed, and the small ghostly platinum dragon hovered over the freshly-filled graves as a testament to his belief in Bahamut's justice.

The sun was up now, and the daylight made travel through the thick groves around the town less risky to their horses. Upon leaving the boundary of the enchantment, Shard marked it carefully so they might find their way back in if they ever needed to. They took advantage of the daylight and put Trammel far behind them. As the autumn sun warmed them, they laughed and complimented each other on the vicious defeat of the ogres, animated and cheerful about each parry and slash and explosion. When they came to a meadow where the creek disappeared into the woods, they called a halt and rested for lunch and an earlynap.

After shaking off the siesta they headed south along the creek for a mostly uneventful day of travel. As the sun dipped lower and lower in the sky and the clouds began to roll in, they heard a howling rise up from the woods on either side of the creek. They urged their horses forward faster and Lenora took charge, pointing at breaks in the treeline where they should keep their eyes. Shard spotted a log bridge well south of them, and beyond that Terciel could make out the shadows of some stone ruins. Thea was looking closer still, and saw the barghests burst from the underbrush.

Barghests are pack animals like wolves, but they're also related to bugbears and hobgoblins. They enjoy their status as the meanest and nastiest of the goblin family, and packs often split up to spread their power among many regional goblin tribes. To find barghests working alone in a pack was striking and unusual. The only thing more striking was Thea, who came sailing out of her saddle with two hands full of sharpened steel. The party charged into the jaws of the ambush, and while the fight was ferocious, there was never a moment where the outcome was in doubt. Even when Thea fell to her knees, she kept swinging. Terciel ended up on the far side of the river, puncturing the enemies from afar with vengeful volleys, barking out angry syllables in Elvish with each heavy draw of his bow. When the dust settled the bargest host lay bloody and dismembered around them, steaming from everywhere Shard's blade had pierced them. The party checked the corpses, dragged them into the woods, and saddled up to make better time. Soon the rains came.

They rode through Coracle Landing, a godsforsaken flyspeck soaked to mud, and discovered a fairly aggressive perimeter guard unlike anything Sir Husit had described: dragonborn standing watch at both town gates (such as they were), and not a soul walking the muddy streets except for an elf watching his drake. The Silver Drake Logging Company had doubtless employed him to seek out a favorable lumber contract in the area, and the weather had forced him to takerefuge for the night. They rode through unmolested, but stopped on their way out of town to allay the fears of the other two dragonborn guarding the south gate. When they commented on the variety of goblins, barghests, orcs, and ogres they'd taken care of already, he seemed content to let them travel on, but warned them to keep their eyes open… any goblins who spied them traveling on horseback in such weather at night would assume they were careless, foolish, or desperate, and would absolutely ambush them.

The goblins were true to form, bursting out haphazardly from behind a fallen tree that had been laid as an obstacle for an ambush. The party made short work of them, fending off strange hexes that sizzled through the air and a vexing cloud that left itchy dust in their eyes despite the downpour. They rode over the goblins and hobgoblins, laying into them with axe and flail, bow and dagger, and a dizzying array of counterspells: Darg's luminous halo, Bree's noxious nimbus of gas, and the weird vexing cloud that irritated them all. By the end of the fight, the air was so full of strange spells interacting with each other that it was hard to tell exactly who was responsible for each one. They rolled the corpses off into the soggy underbrush and rode around the barricade, bound south for Buckle's Landing.

They rode quickly, with hot potatoes in their pockets to ward off the crisp autumn night. Terciel and Shard split the point, navigating by the stars and looking out for any pursuit, but with the death of the wolves their pursuers seemed to have given up on them. As the sky began to turn from black to a dim purple, Terciel shook his head for a moment, convinced he'd fallen asleep in the saddle. A moment later, Darg hollered from the back, "why did we turn around?" His moustache ruffled indignantly as Shard and Terciel conferred and checked their bearings. They were going the wrong way.

Shard dismounted and fired a crossbow bolt on a staked rope into the darkness. He walked along the rope and found himself standing next to the stake, with no quarrel in sight. The others cried out in alarm; for a moment he'd disappeared to all but Terciel's eyes. When Shard returned, Terciel went in and picked a few plants that looked familiar to him, bringing them back to show everyone. When nobody recognized them, Terciel concluded tentatively that they must be near some sort of Fey crossing. It didn't look anything like the portal he had come through before, and Bree, though familiar with the basics of portals,couldn't suss out what exactly was happening.

They looked around, and noted that the trail led right into (and right out of) the disturbance, but while they had localized it, they wouldn't be able to pick their way through the thick woods until sunup. Royce had warned them about Trammel, and it was clear that they had ridden long enough that this strangeness was the town of Trammel, but Sir Husit had said the town was abandoned, and Lord Wossname had asked them to take a look. Surely it couldn't hurt to take a brief detour!

They rode into Trammel, then dismounted: the horses were beginning to shy away from the town as the scent of stale fires and decayed bodies cut through the cloying sweet smell of the fey flowers. The first few buildings they saw were the burned skeletons of normal village dwellings, but as they moved through the town and saw more, they were troubled by the incongruities. Along the left side of the road through town, all of the sheds were full of strange twisted ironwork in cruel shapes… certainly not residences. The manor house's burned-out foundation implied a two- or three-story mansion far larger than one might expect for a village this small. The fresh graveyard in the clearing was guarded by a memento-cantrip of Bahamut, the Platinum Dragon, most likely placed by Sir Husit on his visit.

Just as they were getting nervous and had decided that they'd seen enough, a deep groaning voice called out from the edge of the clearing in a strange language. Once a second voice joined it, Lenora pointed in its direction and whispered sharply to Thea to form a front. The two ogres shambled into view, eyes red with rage, foreheads scarred where Dagog had worn the arcane bindi that made him smart and compliant. These ogres would not be speaking Elvish or peaceably complying with anything. One swung a pair of cruel scourges, heavy whips decorated with bits of chain, thorns, and bones; the other hefted a massive club improvised from the branch of an ironwood tree.

The horses scattered, obscuring nearly everyone's view of the scene, but Bree was accustomed to inferring danger from the knees and ankles she could see. She counted the legs, divided by two, and summoned a pea-green fog of stinking gas up from the turf at the ogres' feet. Thea staggered back, coughing in disgust, axe at the ready. Everyone else was scrambling to take up sound tactical positions, but Rache walked towards the ogres. Once she was close enough to see their eyes through the fog, she locked her gaze with theirs and began whispering under her breath, hands curled around the glowing threads of a strange cat's cradle; they wove together into a barbed bolt and shot forward. The ogre reeled and screamed and Rache started whistling quietly.

Lenora heard a crashing and crunching behind them and turned, hollering to Thea to cover their flank. She charged the third ogre and beat him ferociously with her flail, balanced on the balls of her feet for the inevitable counterattack from the giant oaken branch he was swinging. She barked and shouted at him, striking his joints hard to keep his attention on her while Shard picked his way around behind the big clumsy target. The best thing about the ogres, from Shard's point of view, was the acres of space between the shoulderblades. He picked a spot on a whim and sunk his blade in up to the hilt. A runching and crashing from the underbrush behind him startled him, but not badly enough to make the blade go wide. And even if it had gone wide, it still probably would have hit something vital… the liver on one of these things was probably the size of Darg's head.

Darg backpedaled carefully, staying close to Lenora and casting worried glances over his shoulder at Rache, who was standing her ground. Whenever the ogre wound up to take a big swing at Lenora he would fire a few hammer-shaped bolts of light towards its head. They splashed against its forehead and flashed like lightning disrupting its aim. Shard danced between the closing gap, running out of room, and not one second too soon Thea arrived hollering for glory and blood, axe shining in the brightening dawn.

Bree shot icy blasts at the ogres' feet with one hand while carefully guiding the cloud to envelop them. They staggered forward, swatting at the air with whips and cudgels, trying to get closer. Rache stood her ground, summoning wicked shapes into the air and flinging them into the ogres' faces: a shining necklace that choked one ogre, a bird which flapped drunkenly up to the other ogre and exploded in a puff of sharp feathers. Dark forms oozed out of the dirt and hopped into her waiting palms. Bree saw them getting closer and shouted for Rache to back up. She clapped her hands and a bright flash of multicolored light sprayed wildly from her elbows, briefly illuminating the green cloud but clearly failing to yield the desired effect. An unimpressed gre lashed out at Rache, grabbing her in the vicious bite of his scourge and dragging her back up close. The other swung his club over Bree's head, trying to bash Rache apart. All the while the two ogres hollered at her, always at her, and she just whistled and shot back nightmarish black shadows at them. One fell, blood and smoke pouring from his ears, and Rache deftly stepped backward out of reach again. They followed, brushing past Terciel as though he weren't there, so close Terciel flinched reflexively… but they ignored him. Peeved, he loosed arrows at them. Most sunk into the thick hide armor they wore, or jabbed ineffectually. One caught the remaining ogre high in the neck, and he vented his incomprehensible rage at Terciel while gesturing at Rache.

Lenora and Shard were ducking and weaving faster and faster now as blood coursed from the ogre's hamstrings and he staggered around trying to land a telling blow. He managed to score one or two lucky hits, but eventually dropped in a pool of his own blood only a few feet from the steps of the manor house. Thea continued to trade hits with the last one behind them, and relieved of their burden, Shard and Lenora swooped in to help. In seconds he too was dead. Rache was calmly walking backward while the last ogre stumbled towards her, black frostbitten flesh curling off its ankles where Rache and Bree had both blasted it. Rache saw the last ogre swing its club coming a bit too close to her friend Bree, and scowled. She clenched her fist and then thrust it forward with an open palm. A giant phantom hand mimicked her gesture, pushing through the wretched fog and smashing into the ogre like a steel prison door slamming. Blood squirted out of his eyes and ears, and he collapsed on his knees. He gurgled a few more words, stretched an empty hand out toward her, and fell silent.

Rache pulled out the dagger she had found among Kral's belongings and plunged it into the dead ogre's chest, immediately working to split its rib cage and pull out its heart. The rest of the party looked on in quiet horror, then began investigating the ruins of the village while Rache finished her grisly task.

The fires were spreading throughout the village, and many of the villagers had fled to the fields to avoid the blazewyrms. At the south end of town, Darg and Shard immediately hollered to the bystanders to take stock of their town and urged them to help put out the fires south of the orchard, and Rache coyly shamed the fleeing townsfolk into helping. Lenora and Thea set up a bucket brigade from the water sump north of the orchard, and Rache ran up and down the main road through town blasting ice crystals at the still-smoldering flames. Terciel jogged out to the edges of the fields, looking for stray fires and trying to discern whether the wind was going to spread the flames through the wheat or rye fields.

The fires were quickly succumbing to the efforts of the adventurers and the odd motivated villager. Royce in particular was inspired by their efforts to save his tavern and brewery, and was doing a great job right up until the wolves burst out of the forest to the south.

They angled in from the south, eyes glowing in the darkness, led by a giant beast that had the shape of a wolf but was nearly as large as the alligator they'd seen in the sewers a few days earlier. Lenora and Thea heard Darg yell "wolves! to arms!" and they dropped their buckets and ran full-tilt to the south. Bree was having trouble seeing in the fading light, and noticed a large dead shrub between her position and the wolves'. She wiggled two fingers at the bush and it burst into flames, bringing the charging pack of wolves up short.

Rather than charge through the underbrush and pounce, they were forced to split and keep the burning bush between them. Terciel feathered a few of them, nimbly falling back out of reach of their snapping jaws and pulling at least one of them away from the pack. Darg stepped in blasting with bolts of silvery light; in the deepening darkness the prayers took on the shape of silvered hammers swinging fiercely at the wolves' heads. Shard snuck between two buildings and lashed out with his silvered short sword, plunging it deep into one of the wolves' flanks. The wound hissed and steamed, and Shard barked "lycanthropes! Werewolves!" instinctively. The giant wolf turned its head and regarded him with glowing red eyes, but he slipped out of view and back into the shadows. A scowl played across Rache's lips as she thought back to the wererats, and all they had done to Ilian, Zlata, and Shard's family… she clapped her hands and a cloud blacker than midnight drifted up from the damp soil and engulfed the wolves. Crackling violet bolts of energy illuminated the outer edges, but the pillar of darkness was otherwise impossible to see through. The wolves trapped inside yipped and barked in pain, and Bree giggled as a particularly appropriate spell came to mind. She clapped her hands, and the yips and barks slowed to groggy half-yelps.

They had been trying to drag Royce away, but the plan fell apart in seconds as they found themselves caught in a darkness even their night vision could not penetrate, assailed by electric agony, and despite the pain, drifting into a heavy-lidded nap.

In the same moment, Thea and Lenora arrived at a dead run and threw themselves into the fray. Lenora picked up the wolf trying to come around the outside edge, while Thea laughed and brought her axe to bear against the giant beast in the middle of the pack. As each of the smaller wolves fell its body lay there, unaccountably failing to polymorph. The spells and the burning bush boxed them in, and soon enough even the biggest one was dripping its black blood from a dozen arrows with deep slashes from Thea's axe marring its dark grey pelt. When it fell, there was a loud crackling noise, like a bundle of twigs being snapped slowly from inside a barrel of blood. The wolf's skin lay on the ground, defeated, and under the huge pelt, Shard felt the telltale geometry of a human skeleton.

Royce wiped his brow and looked at them all in the firelight. "That's three times you've saved me and I didn't even know you at sunup. This might be the luckiest day of my life! Come in, take some hot grog and some venison, and I'll put you up for the night." They protested that the riders they'd chased off were certainly after Sister Marina, and Royce considered their situation. "They may be after her, but you'll get there first. Those fools headed due south. If they'd had a friend in the inn-keeping business, they'd know that the swamps south of here flood in the fall. Flooding's been worse than usual this season, and the only bridges out there are rope bridges. Can't ride a horse there. If they ride hard, they'll be knee-deep in mire an hour or two after midnight, at which point they'll need to backtrack. From there, they'll need to either follow the swamp roads east to Coracle Landing and south to Buckle's Ferry, or go west through the forests back to Baerstun and take the Misty March overland. You could set out at sunup and go through the forests to the east; the goblins and kobolds won't be out in daylight, and even if they are, you'll outrun 'em easily."

They conferred briefly and asked if there was a faster way. "Well, it's a little further, but heading to the headwaters of McGuffin Creek through fields would take you up to Trammel," and here he made a superstitious gesture, "and you'd get there about sunup. You could ride around it, turn south when you reach the creek, and make it to Coracle Landing well ahead of your quarry. I don't think they'd thank you for setting an ambush down in the Landing, though; they've had trouble enough with fires." Lenora consulted with the others, and asked whether they might trade their horses for fresher mounts. Royce practically jumped out of his boots to help, hollering for a stable boy to make the horses ready. In a few minutes, they found themselves around a thick wooden table scarfing down a hearty venison stew while the stable boy brought around fresh horses to replace the older tired mounts they'd worn out on the first leg of the trip. The younger horses seemed fine. While they ate, Royce bandaged their wounds.

When they got ready to leave they found Rache wandering near the orchard, absentmindedly stamping on and kicking at the embers that had fallen off one of the apple sheds. She was chewing an apple thoughtfully with a faraway look in her eyes, but when they asked what she'd been doing, she pointed to the last few fires and said that she wanted to be sure they didn't leave any trouble behind them here. When Royce offered her some stew, she declined, but he slyly passed her a hunk of hearty bread wrapped around a hot slice of the roast. They saddled up and looked up into the sky to get their bearings. Royce gave them a few perfunctory directions, and asked if there was anything else he could get them before they set out for Trammel, Coracle Landing, and points south.

The note that Marina had left was gone, and the bartender apologized profusely. She had a mind like a game-snare, though, and recalled exactly what the note had said: Royce the brewer, in Feppic, would know where Marina could be found. To Feppic then, with high hopes to close the gap and let Marina know what's going on. Getting horses wasn't too difficult, either. The farming season was drawing to a close, and nobody wanted to feed and stable them over the course of the winter coming up. Most of the leftovers would be requisitioned as cart-horses for moving food to the army near Whitescale, anyway.

With six horses and plenty of provisions set in, the party headed out the Artisans' Gate and left Baerstun behind them, riding hard and turning right at Sweetwater to put the sun behind them. From there the going got considerably less developed, with no good roads to be found. Bree remembered the miserable tale of a traveler she had met who had come through this place and suggested a route that wouldn't lead them into the worst of the rocky pine scrub, while Terciel looked for roots and tangles. Shard took point, scouting for danger or ambushes, while Thea turned and squinted through their dust into the setting sun, trying to pick out anyone who might be following. Darg and Lenora concerned themselves with the horses, and Rache tried not to get too queasy.

Thea eventually hopped down off her horse and jogged alongside it to let it take a rest from hauling her armor and axe, while Lenora watched the other horses to make sure they weren't ailing. Bree had a close call, nearly falling off the horse when they crested a ridge and had to turn suddenly to avoid a tangle of roots, but she was fine. Rache was able to deflect the questions the first few times, but Darg saw something in her eyes and feigned frustration with a bundle of bandages he'd been carrying. He asked her if she'd mind carrying it so he could pay more attention and hold the reins (maybe not spill the halfling this time) and she graciously agreed. Soon enough there was no light left, and Shard scurried out into the long shadows to set snares and noisemakers while Terciel walked a large circle around the campsite looking for the best tree to perch in overnight. He settled in quietly, listening for any abnormal sound.

Two or three hours after midnight they all woke up to the sound of Shard's noisemakers. The racket was punctuated by the sounds of something or someone running away through the woods, but when they were able to walk the perimeter they found only a few bootprints. Someone had definitely tried to sneak into their camp, and had left quickly when they were discovered. The group settled back to sleep grumpily, except for Terciel, who quietly made his devotions to Melora, with a kindly word to Avandra tossed in for good measure.

Bree awoke and mumbled the best prayers she could remember, hoping for a bit of Avandra's favor to carry them to their destination safely, or at least without anything boring or lethal happening to them.

[Monday at dawn, after an extended rest]

Lenora, Darg, and Shard looked at the horse's hurt leg in the light of day and decided that if they were going to press the pace again they would need to spend some time tending to it, so they patched it up as best they could. Thea stretched out her sore legs and did her best to ignore the pain, helped along by Rache's storytelling. They had been on a dusty path alongside a field of tall grain when they noticed Shard had stopped and dismounted beyond the fork in the path, waving them forward. They all passed the crossroads unassumingly and then halted. Shard gave them the news: the idle farmers they had seen earlier in the day, the riders they'd passed before lunch, and the observers who had been on the crossroads just now were the same three. They were being dogged by the three riders and had only just noticed them.

Shard and Terciel crept through the grain to get a better look, perhaps even listen to their conversation, and came away with this: the three were a male duergar, a female elf or eladrin, and a human. They were on decent enough horses, and the last thing they said was "we can definitely beat them there if we hurry. Let's away!" and with that, they were gone. Terciel, Shard, and Darg mounted the three fastest horses, leaving the slower horses for Thea, Lenora, Rache, and Bree; they rode ahead at a murderous pace, and arrived in Feppic in late afternoon.

When they came to the inn, there was a red-haired dwarf behind the bar cleaning the glasses, and two strangers seated quietly at a table, having a late lunch. They might have been farmers, locals, or travelers, but the appearance of an eladrin, a dwarf, and a tiefling in close company and armed to the teeth was clearly the most interesting thing that had happened to them in months or years. They sat rapt while Shard hailed the bartender and asked after Royce. The dwarf remarked that Royce could usually be found behind the bar, cleaning the glasses, and introduced himself to the three of them.

They asked if he knew where Marina was, and remarked off-handedly that they'd slain untold numbers of the undead under Baerstun, and that it was important that they find Marina even though she had fled suddenly. He seemed to take it in stride easily enough, asking them a few questions about her health and looks. It seemed he was looking for a way to be sure they were the right ones. Shard's nerves seemed to worry him, though, and when he asked why they all seemed so jumpy, Shard explained that they had been followed. Given that they didn't know their pursuers but that anyone trying to intervene probably meant harm to them, Marina, and anyone else in their way, Royce's suggestion that they take cover and let Royce handle it seemed bold.

Shard glanced out the window looking for a safe place from which to cover the doors. Terciel and Darg headed out back to quickly hide their horses in the stables and find themselves cover as well.

The streets were too quiet by half. The temple of Ioun had been quiet, but on emerging into the streets, the noise didn't change: no grumbling bustle, no hungover merchants, no servants lazily going about their day's work. A few market stalls were set up, but the sellers all appeared to have taken a break and thrown up hasty "out tolunch" signs. Around the corner to the south, a few raggedy-looking men in city guard and royal navy outfits were brandishing slings and daggers: definitely not standard issue. The closer they came, the more obvious it was that these were not real city guards.

Terciel unslung his bow and started looking for a vantage point while Shard moved cautiously towards them with his crossbow out. The two accosted the counterfeit guards, urging them to set down their weapons and leave. Two of them moved to the right, seeking cover by an outdoor market with stalls selling spices and incense. One closed in, knife drawn. The last one grabbed a handful of rocks and slung themat Terciel and Shard, which earned him a quick death on the end of a crossbow quarrel.

Thea and Lenora decided to wade in and make things uncomfortable for these impostors, and Terciel decided he'd be more effective on the rooftops. In a pop of strange fey energy, he appeared well above the crowd and staked out a dormer from which to rain down death and arrows. As the tactical situation appeared to go pear-shaped for theaggressors, they started to withdraw, although Shard thought he saw one of them scrambling over the low roof of the marketplace.

Just then two men dressed in shabby and out of date cavalry uniforms charged around the corner behind them on a pair of war horses. One dismounted immediately, tossed a net over Darg, lashed it to his horse, and gave the horse's rump a smack before unslinging a trident and wading into the fight. His partner chose to stay on his horse and try to break up the melee from a more secure fighting position. WhileThea deflected his trident blows with her axe, Rache kindled flashes of fire around the horse's flanks, trying to spook it. Just before the horse took off, a pair of thugs who had been lurking in the shadows knelt near Darg, jabbed him with their knives, sheathed them, and ran away. Apparently content with stabbing the dwarf once, they looked to be headed for the city gate.

Terciel discovered that he was the fifth person to have the brilliant idea of raining death from above onto his enemies from this particular patch of rooftop. The other four were nearby and had drawn their daggers, hoping to close with him and corner the market on snipers' nests. If they were also out for blood, Terciel might be spared… or he might be dumped off the rooftop. He decided not to take any chances and started shooting the seven hells out of anything that moved up on his roof.

Lenora and Thea worked the pincer movement on the horse and rider, while Rache slipped through the thin fog that always seemed to surround her when things got ugly like this; Rache popped in and out of sight, dazzling the enemies with sharp gestures and crackling infernal magic. Bree pulled her share of the weight with a set of deftly-aimed magic missiles that dropped one of the fleeing villains. Darg had untangled himself from the net now, and the horse that had dragged him off was standing nervously in the middle of the street. Shard had taken cover under an awning and was picking off the thugs silhouetted against the opposite roofline as they came after Terciel.

Lenora and Thea unhorsed the second rider but his partners got a bit of Lenora's blood on a knife as well. Outnumbered at street level, they tossed the bloody blade up to the roof, apparently preferring the odds up there. Rache saw Terciel pinned down and the bloody trident skittering across the roof, and she piffed into place with her foot atop it, delivering a painful eldritch blast to the surprised halfling who had intended to grab it. She gave him another double-handed blast, and he tumbled off the roof. She looked down, waved to Shard, and kicked the trident down the tiles and over the edge and down to the street. He was already moving towards it.

Bree was always eager to see new spells, but blood magic using her friends' blood would almost certainly end badly. If the escaping 'guards' could get to the quarter gate and convince the real city watch to close the portcullis, it would be half an hour before the iron bars came back up, and the ritual would take place. Worse still,Bree would lose the satisfaction of observing it! She screwed her mouth into a determined wrinkle, took a deep breath, and accelerated in a magically-assisted burst of speed that ended in a handspring, a half-gainer, and a landing upon the horse that had dragged Darg away. "Hyah! Go! Horse, Go! Thataway!" She barked a few different command words, and then in frustration kicked its sides with her heels, and she was off.

The fight by the temple wore down quickly, the noise receding as the number of combatants dwindled. Thea grabbed the wounded warhorse, hauled herself into the saddle one-handed, and spurred it towards the alley market where the last few rogues had disappeared. She was behind them, and had seen Bree moving to cut them off from the fore, so now it was just a question of when. Bree was less confident, because she could now see their third mounted companion closing on her from a blind alley that she had passed, where he had waited in ambush. She was ahead of him, and so started screaming "CLOSETHEGATES! SOMETHING'S ON FIRE! THEREAREMONSTERS! THISHORSE IS STOLEN!" and anything else she could think of. He urged his horse forward and clubbed Bree's shoulders with a morningstar as he rode past. She hunched down, smacked the side of her horse, and passed him again, driving toward the center of the narrowing street.

This time, when he moved to pass, she was ready: she jabbed her staff out at him, and swung it backward with all of her weight behind it. When his jaw connected with the hard wood, he stretched out backwards in the air almost completely horizontally, toes pointed at the sky, eyes drooping shut, and slid across the cobblestones as his horse galloped up to the portcullis, whinnying at the guards standing there. Bree wheeled the horse around, looked down at her quarry, and then noticed the two guards from earlier running through a market to her left with Thea inhot pursuit.

They skidded to a stop, turned on their heels, and found themselves trapped between Thea and Bree's horses, and in moments they were apprehended by the crowd of (real) city guardsmen who had come to see why a halfling was racing against a bandit dressed as a watchman on stolen horses from the King's Cavalry, and how on earth she hadprevailed.

[…]

Within a few minutes they had settled the details of who knew what, and when, and why, and the horses were being led back to the cavalry officers who had lost them. The criminals had spilled their guts in exchange for comparably light sentences as oarsmen aboard Adm. Godwin's ship, and the adventurers had searched the address to which the criminals were supposed to bring the blood. Since it involved the Champions, it seemed a good bet that whomever had planned the daring daylight ambush was desperate to cast a ritual using their blood. Perhaps they had spoiled another plan, and this was a last-ditch effort? Marina, Bronn, and Krunis would probably know, but they hadalready fled the city.

Digging a little more carefully among Marina's acquaintances, they learned that she had left a note at the Horse & Hound for them, telling them that Royce the Brewer would know how to find her. Royce lived in Feppic, a flyspeck of a village about a day's ride east from Baerstun, towards Trammel. That meant horses and hasty travel… and adventure!

The first hint that dinner was going to be unusual was the guest list. Admiral Godwin and Lieutenant Magnusson were there, seated at the foot of the table. Sir Hobart Husit, recently employed as the magistrate for East Baerstun County, was there with Mme. Daniella, a tavern singer from the Horse and Hound. And at the head of the table next to Lord Wossname were Ilian and his niece Lichna, who was sitting in for Zlata. Darg blessed the food and the guests in Moradin's name, and everyone dug in.

Admiral Godwin was delighted to see Rache and Bree again, as was Lieutenant Magnusson. The Admiral was eager to enlist them in the war effort – possibly helping to round up criminals or the unemployed to join her navy. She spoke at length about a new set of galleys under construction in the Redstone Peninsula's shipyards, and how the reservists marching from Galena would meet the galleys at Southgate, board, and sail behind Bonewhite's lines southwest of Whitescale. A source within the Caliphate had tipped off the navy to Bonewhite's plans, and now it was only a matter of springing the trap forcefully.

The strange weather at the mouth of the Redstone had caused the Admiral to miss her only chance to personally inspect the shipyards. She asked after the adventurers' plans and suggested that if they didn't mind disposing of their warrants, they could travel incognito to the Peninsula and find out what General Bonewhite was trying to accomplish down there… and if they just happened to make it to the shipyards, they could look around nonchalantly and do an informal inspection.

Ilian turned purple but bit his tongue when the Admiral spoke of press gangs, but Lenora and Shard were able to distract him; he stammered his way towards an apology but didn't quite get the whole thing in edgewise before Sir Husit spoke up. He opened up about the sad state of justice, not just in the city, but in the surrounding county. As the recently-resigned magistrate, he was saddest of all, and told a strange tale about a temple to Bahamut that had been burned to the ground, and of two tieflings blamed, framed, and eventually released for the arson, leaving the villain's identity undiscovered. He also told of a village called Trammel that had appeared out of nowhere on his circuit, though none could remember it ever having been there before. The village's utter destruction and the discovery of a dead eladrin in the manor house of the village added a spice of the arcane to the whole mystery. He confessed that the crumbling order in the county, and his seeming inability to keep track of his territory, had left his faith shaken. He said that he was likely to set out for Galena City, or perhaps even across the southern sea to the home temple to Bahamut, to find a replacement. In the interim, Lord Wossname asked if perhaps one or more of the party would be willing to fill in and take his place.

There was plenty of back and forth on the subject, but no commitment on the part of the adventurers. Wossname asked after Rache's accent and they wondered if perhaps he had mistaken her for Rache's sister Staci, who had lived near Coracle Landing for a while. Rache in turn asked after the Easy Drifter, and got only a little bit more information: the captain had been stuck north of the strange weather at the mouth of the Redstone River, and had only just sailed south to Rudderbreak on the south shore of the Peninsula. Rudderbreak's on-again, off-again economy and the slow pace of life down there implied that anyone who had been aboard the Drifter when she put in would either be stuck in Rudderbreak waiting for the ship to be repaired, or would have set out north for Seven Mills to try to make some money at the Harvest Festival there. While discussing shipping traffic in the bay, the two sailors and Sir Husit briefly discussed a dwarf named Buckle who operates a lighthouse and ferry service in Baerstun Bay, bringing anyone who can pay across from Baerstun County to the Peninsula, or back. The symmetry with the name "Buckle" from one of Tarin's letters did not go unnoticed.

Daniella modestly avoided the group's scrutiny, but did point out that songs about the adventurers were already becoming popular in town, and that she had been asked a few times to sing about them during her shifts at the Horse and Hound. After several more hearty gulps of Wossname's excellent wine, Illian finally proposed a toast to friendship and allegiance; the sailors countered with toasts to the King ("To the King!") and as dinner drew to a close most hard feelings appeared to be mended.

[Sunday]

The next morning came along right on schedule: too early, and too bright. They decided to visit a few of their friends in town and settle their affairs before making preparations to travel. They hadn't yet decided whether to head east towards Trammel and Husit's circuit, or southeast along the bay to Buckle's Ferry and crossing to the Peninsula, or south through the Misty March and then southeast through the Peninsula. Most importantly, they wanted to warn Sister Marina and their other friends in town that Darja had slipped through their net, and while most of her principals had been killed (Tarin four times over) her plan appeared to be intact.

Their first stop at the Temple of Melora brought on some distressing news: an acolyte was dead in the basement, and Sr. Marina had fled town in a hurry at first light. After careful investigation, the adventurers discovered that a group of acolytes had been led astray, and rather than simply copy pages from the Meloran Book of Binding, they had shirked their duty and begun attempting to cast some of the rituals therein. Channeling a too-powerful ritual had burned the life right out of the poor dead acolyte, but more inquiries revealed that the acolyte had not been alone. Eventually it came out that there was an eighth acolyte, who had fled as well. Her copybooks were empty, she had no dormitory in the temple, and soon enough it was clear that Darja and Mariposa had been taking turns sitting in on the acolytes' secret meetings and copying rituals from the Binding Book.

The Binding Books are seven books, owned by the temple of Ioun and loaned out to the seven founding temples of Baerstun. Each covers a specific flavor of Binding, and each temple has their acolytes research and copy details of the binding rituals, including scholarly papers on the nuances and longhand copies of the untested rituals.

The bindings are there to hold… well, something horrific, certainly. It turns out Baerstun was founded on top of a barrows at the end of the Great War, and the incarnate child of an evil deity (Gruumsh, Bane, Orcus, or possibly something else) was thrown into the grave and the Barrow Stone was set over it. The city was founded atop the grave, and the seven temples established to safeguard the seven kinds of seals holding him/her/it under the Barrow Stone.

Discovering that basic piece of history was inordinately difficult, and it seemed that only a few of the high priests and priestesses in Baerstun were aware of their sacred duty. While residents of the city understand that bad dreams come with the territory and that occasionally an undead creature will stagger out of the Stone Quarter, in general it appears that the populace is blissfully ignorant of what's buried beneath them. Given Darja's involvement in the catacombs, Tarin's iron smuggling, and the murder of the acolyte, Darja seems to know plenty about the seals.

By early afternoon they had cleaned themselves up and eaten, and so the seven adventurers wandered around Baerstun together soaking up the sights of Market Day. Wossname's messenger had found some of them alone and soon enough found the others in a large pack, but he eventually succeeded in delivering all of their invitations to the dinner:

The Honor of Your Presence Is Requested

at a fine dinner to be given at two hours past sunset in the

SMALL HALL of BAERSTUN KEEP

ROYAL QUARTER, BAERSTUN

Where Lord Wossname will celebrate the Most Excellent Achievements of his newest warrant officers in the august company of like-minded friends.

So among the many other things they needed were clothes that weren't smeared in sewage! The party decided to convert some of Kral's gems to cash and scour the city for a few odds & ends before dinner. Their first business foray was a bit lackluster, but they got a good feel for the ebb and flow of commerce in the city. Their second attempt to sell the gems met with marginally more success – Rache shed crocodile tears and spun an incredibly convincing yarn about her debt and the dead veteran who had fallen nobly in combat, angling for another five or ten percent. The tale was airtight except for the dwarf in Moradinnic robes claiming to be her creditor, and they escaped with a few exasperated looks from the proprietor and what they assumed was the fair market value for the gems.

They went back to the inn for a quick bite, changed into their armor, and headed out to look over 23 Temple Street before dinner. The adventurers found a group of merry merchants sitting out on the downstairs patio enjoying strong drinks. A brief discussion revealed that the upstairs tenants were quiet, kept to themselves, and had negotiated nearly double the usual rental price in order to retain all copies of the landlord's key. One of the tipsy folks was the caretaker, and when the party threatened to break down the door on their authority as duly-sworn warrant officers, he hemmed, hawed, and invited them in to climb a ladder through the furniture hatch. While they fiddled with the hatch and discovered it nailed shut, the adventurers began to immediately make loud noises about using Darg's door-opener, and the caretaker headed back to the kitchens to find something to pick the lock with. Inebriated and entirely unfamiliar with jimmying locks – or eager to appear unwise in lawbreaking – he returned with useless bits of metallic junk.

A voice from the porch above hollered out "Guys! It's already open." It sounded like Shard, but he had been right… ah. Yes, it was him. When the caretaker looked up agog, Shard shrugged; when Bree cocked her head and gave Shard a quizzical look, he flashed a mischievous grin and gestured through the door, as though welcoming her. His artfully-palmed lockpicks were nearly invisible.

On entering they found a fireplace, a beat-up rug that covered the furniture lift, and three bedrooms toward the rear of the apartment. The first room had black cloth over the windows and a thick black wolf’s pelt over a black leather curtain separating it from the common area. The clothes on the hempen line in this room were ostentatious and out of date: sewer-stained leathern traveling pants, men's traveling clothes, and enough other items of similar cut and size that it was simple enough to deduce that Kral had lived here. If that weren't evidence enough, the tenant's small map satchel contained traveling maps from all over Galena and other places – also very old and out of date – along with a freehand sketch that is unmistakably a rendering of Garon with notes like “amplify binding magic on joints with Farrigan’s Pinch” and “protect from fire using Brightbane’s Poultice – what about divine magic?” Last but not least, a note was pinned to the straw pallet, written in a familiar hand:

Aladar can get you more money if you need it, so stop pestering me. I expect progress, not excuses. Don’t touch the expenses chest; everything in it is reserved for forging the Blade. -DARJA

The second room was also blacked out with cloth over the windows and a heavy double-layered tapestry. The only two sets of clothes in this room were both cut for a woman of middling height, and hung from the hempen rope clothesline as in Kral's room. An up-to-date set of robes denoting a moderately high ranking Erathene priestess and a set of blacksmith's leathers with no scorching or wear-and-tear of any kind visible. Not even the smell of a forge! Curiouser and curiouser. The last feature of the room was a full-length mirror, which reflected the dark room and even appeared to cast its own dim flickering light. As Rache and Lenora checked it for signs of occult tampering, the others moved to the last room, where they found yet another abandoned and disheveled dormitory.

The clothes in the last room were cut for someone Bree's size: a female of extraordinarily short stature. Her room appeared to be the most recently occupied: actual dirty dishes, clothes that appeared to be well worn, and yet another set of Erathene robes (these for an acolyte) and a set of blacksmith's leathers, unused. Off to one side, her efforts at studying showed: a wooden alchemist's rack with several delicate glass spheres nestled inside, with no apparent opening or contents. Her books contained recipes for all manner of strange potions, including eyesting, smokestick, and a blinding bomb, but reading through the recipes yielded no mention of the glass spheres; her book also contained a few names and addresses in the Stone Quarter, a sketch of an archway like the one from Kral's trunk, and a thin ribbon with a cheap silver ring on it. Whomever she was, she kept horrid company, and they didn't feel at all bad about taking the books. Darg grabbed the ring and headed back to the living room to see if he could puzzle out the diagram.

With everyone giving perhaps too many helpful suggestions, Darg eventually tapped the ring against the brick called out in the diagrams, and – voila! – the wood in the fireplace burned to ash and a chest appeared in its place. The chest was unlocked, untrapped, and cool to the touch. Inside Darg found 75 pounds of loose coin, totaling well over 500 gold [n.b. the exact total was 530gp, 800sp, 507cp]. Shard, Rache, and Darg immediately began talking eagerly amongst themselves, and when Bree heard the plan she eagerly counted herself in. The four of them gathered up Kral's notes and began to piece together a missive in his handwriting to leave Darja speechless:

"Hey, I needed some money, so I cleaned out the expense account. -KRAL"

Bree headed back to tell Lenora about the strategically useful mischief they had wrought, and found Lenora staring into the mirror where Rache had seen her reflection turn to smoke and slither out of sight. When Rache had reached out to touch the surface of the mirror her hand met no resistance. When Lenora asked Rache to describe again what she had seen, Rache obliged, and when she had the group's attention they all agreed that it bore a closer look. Bree crept towards the mirror, poked briefly at it, and then walked back over to Lenora and had a short hushed conversation just below a whisper. Darg tossed a fish through on a string. A fish… on a string. The rope was singed in pieces, but they did see that the fish had entered the reflected room through a wall that they could see. Debates broke out, broad hand gestures of N-dimensionality and twisting pathways. Lenora tried to pull the mirror off the wall with no luck, and turned back to talk to Bree about the possibility of exploration, when with a crackling fizzle, Rache stepped right through.

Chaos in the apartments now, as shadows swarmed in the mirror and Rache was visible off to the far side of the reflected room. Inside, she was being attacked by shadowy figures dressed in black burlap. They were faceless, ageless, and tormented, and yet Rache could see in their motions the memories of Tarin the Stoat and an orcish witch doctor. Once dead, twice dead, dead forever – they still stalked toward her and began casting powerful spells. Tarin, never a spellcaster, surprised her by reaching out and pulling a long skein of silvery smoke from her ears. She blinked, trying to remember any of the spells she had taught herself recently; all were blank to her. The two closed in on her, but a series of sharp popping noises echoed through the nearly featureless stone chamber, and her companions strode through the weird shimmering flames along the walls, split up by some trick of the light or the portal.

The four robed figures were living memories: servants charged with a vow of secrecy so powerful that upon their death their souls were stranded here in this mirror world to prevent them from falling into the hands of devils or demons. It was an old trick, but its age did not make it any easier to pull off; whoever had condemned these four to this prison was a powerful spellcaster and likely a worshiper of Vecna, Orcus, or Gruumsh. The four souls that were trapped here were manifestations of Tarin, Kral, Mariposa, and the orcish witch doctor, and they were understandably upset about being trapped. They relished trying to pull the memories from their victims, but were not above resorting to the mundane and pedestrian solution of death by excruciating pain. What other entertainment for a creature doomed to an eternity of keeping someone else's secrets? Rache crumpled beneath the torrent of spellfire and mind-searing psychic intrusion.

Lenora was having none of it. Stomping through the wall of flames she found herself closest to Rache and immediately set about pummeling Tarin's living memory. Her third or fourth blow struck a weak spot and his featureless face began to slough off. His robe burned, and his scream of pain carried like a blast wave. Lenora and Rache both staggered back, but Lenora shook it off and strode back up to him. His fingernails were stretching out into elongated claws now, and the transformation to something hideous was almost complete when Lenora shattered his skull with her flail. The corpse dropped to the floor and began to dissolve into the floor tiles like chalk drawings in a heavy rain.

Thea held the center of the room while Terciel and Shard lit into the others. Darg attended to Rache, and Bree discovered herself alone up on the second floor of the chamber with no friends in sight. "Rats," she whispered, "everyone else must be lost!" Kral's memory came for her, but she dodged around it and soon found Thea and the others making their stand in the midst of the chamber. Lenora stepped from one to the next, dispatching each one moments after it shrieked and began to melt into the hideous clawed abomination that Tarin had become. The others concentrated on protecting each other, unsure what a claw wound from one might portend. In moments the fight was over, and Darg managed to patch up Rache easily. Together they were able to find their way back through the mirror, and they started a second search of the documents to see what might have been revealed now that the secret-keepers had been banished.